On December 4th, the ceremony of the 7th Annual Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards took place in New York. The Kantar Information is Beautiful Award is one of the most prestigious awards across the world in the field of infographics, where the winners are selected by a panel of experts and a public vote. This time designers, users and the expert panel met to award winners within categories such as data visualizations, infographics, interactives & information art.

For the first time, the category Politics & Globalwas included in the nominations. The bronze winner of this category was the article “Elected Leaders are Making the World Less Democratic” by Lauren Leatherby & Mira Rojanasakul at Bloomberg (2018). The article was published in July and the authors used V-Dem data (and primarily V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index) to create visualizations and portray countries’ rises, falls and ranks.

By using the V-Dem data the authors visually presented the most important message from the V-Dem Democracy Report 2018: a global phenomenon that affects one third of the world’s population, where for the first time in several decades, the world is becoming less democratic.